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Dylan Thomas’s villanelle “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night is addressed

to his aged father. The poem is remarkable in a number of ways, most notably in that

contrary to most common poetic treatments of the inevitability of death, which argue for

serenity or celebrate the peace that death provides, this poem urges resistance and

rage in the face of death. It justifies that unusual attitude by describing the rage and

resistance to death of four kinds of men, who each can summon up the image of a

complete and satisfying life that is denied to him by death.

The first tercet of the intricately rhymed villanelle opens with an arrested line. The

adjective gentle appears where we would expect the adverb gently. The strange diction

suggests that gentle may describe both the going (i.e., gently dying) and the person

(i.e., gentleman) who confronts death. Further, the speaker characterizes “night,” here

clearly a figure of death, as “good.” Yet in the next line, the speaker urges that the aged

should violently resist death, characterized as the “close of day” and “the dying of the

light” (lines 2-3). In effect, the first three lines argue that however good death may be,

the aged should refuse to die gently, should passionately rave and rage against death.
 In the second tercet, the speaker turns to a description of the way the first of four

types of men confronts death, which is figuratively defined throughout the poem as “that

good night” and “the dying” of the light”. These are the “wise men,” the scholar, the

philosophers, those who understand the inevitability of death, men who “know dark is

right” (4). But they do not acquiesce in death “because their words had forked no

lightning,” because their published wisdom failed to bring them to that sense of

completeness and fulfillment that can accept death (5). Therefore, wise as they are,

they reject the theoretical “rightness” of death and refuse to “go gentle.”

The second sort of men – “good men,” the moralists, the social reformers, those

who attempt to better the world through action as the wise men attempt to better it

through “words” – also rage against death. Their deeds are, after all, “frail.” With sea

imagery, the speaker suggests that these men night have accomplished fine and fertile

things – their deeds “might have danced in a green bay” (8). But with the “last wave”

gone, they see only the frailty, the impermanence of their acts, and so they, too, rage

against the death that deprives them of the opportunity to leave a meaningful legacy.

The “wild men,” the poets who “sang” the loveliness and vitality of nature, also

learn as they approach death that the sensuous joys of human existence wane (10). As

the life-giving sun moves toward dusk, as death approaches, their singing turns to

grieving, and they refuse to surrender gently, to leave willingly the warmth, pleasure,

and beauty that life can give.

Finally, with a pun suggestive of death, the “grave men,” those who go through

life with such high seriousness as never to experience gaiety and pleasure, see all the
joyous possibilities that they were blind to in life (13). And they, too, rage against the

dying of the light that they had never properly seen before.

The speaker then calls on his aged father to join these men against death. Only

in this final stanza do we discover that the entire poem is addressed to the speaker’s

father and that, despite the generalized statements about old age and the focus on

types of men, the poem is a personal lyric. The edge of death becomes a “sad height,”

the summit of wisdom and experience old age attains includes the sad knowledge of

life’s failures to satisfy the vision we all pursue (16). The depth and complexity of the

speaker’s sadness is startlingly given in the second line, when he calls on his father to

both curse and bless him. These opposites richly suggest several related possibilities:

“Curse me for not living up to your expectations. Curse me for remaining alive as you

die. Bless me with forgiveness for my failings. Bless me for teaching you to rage against

death.” And the curses and the blessings are contained in the “fierce tears” – fierce

because you will burn and rave and rage against death (17). As the poem closes by

bringing together the two powerful refrains, the speaker himself seems to rage because

his father’s death will cut off a relationship that is incomplete.

 Work Cited

Thomas, Dylan. “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” Literature: The Human

Experience. Shorter Ninth Edition. Eds. Richard Abcarian and Marvin Klotz.

Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2007. 1083. Print.